Trailing Clouds of Glory: Zachary Taylor's Mexican War Campaign and His Emerging Civil War Leaders
326
Trailing Clouds of Glory: Zachary Taylor's Mexican War Campaign and His Emerging Civil War Leaders
326eBook
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Overview
Trailing Clouds of Glory is the first examination of the roles played in the Mexican War by the large number of men who served with Taylor and who would be prominent in the next war, both as volunteer and regular army officers, and it provides fresh information, even on such subjects as Robert E. Lee and Ulysses S. Grant. Particularly interesting for the student of the Civil War are largely unknown aspects of the Mexican War service of Daniel Harvey Hill, Braxton Bragg, and Thomas W. Sherman.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780817383329 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | University of Alabama Press |
| Publication date: | 03/16/2010 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 326 |
| File size: | 3 MB |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
Trailing Clouds of Glory
Zachary Taylor's Mexican War Campaign and His Emerging Civil War Leaders
By Felice Flanery Lewis
The University of Alabama Press
Copyright © 2010 The University of Alabama PressAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8173-5869-3
CHAPTER 1
Taylor's Corps of Observation
Preparations for a possible military resolution of the numerous long -standing differences between the United States and Mexico began in the spring of 1844, when annexation of the Republic of Texas to its neighbor to the northeast appeared likely, and Mexico had vowed that it would regard such an arrangement as a declaration of war. The initial components of the army that Brevet Brigadier General Zachary Taylor would lead to the Rio Grande — eight companies each of the Third and Fourth U.S. Infantry regiments, and seven companies of the Second U.S. Dragoons — were brought together in the vicinity of Fort Jesup, Louisiana, near the Sabine River border between the United States and the Republic of Texas, immediately after a treaty providing for the annexation of Texas by the United States was signed by Secretary of State John C. Calhoun on April 12, 1844. The men in the seven companies of dragoons, whose regiment had until recently been dismounted for about a year and termed "riflemen," were already quartered at Jesup. The Third and Fourth Infantry companies had for some time been stationed at Jefferson Barracks, about ten miles south of St. Louis, Missouri. On April 11, 1844, the day before the annexation treaty was signed, orders were issued directing members of the Third Infantry who were at Jefferson Barracks to "proceed by water, without delay, to Natchitoches, and thence to Fort Jesup." A similar order went out to the Fourth Infantry commander on April 22.
President John Tyler, in a message addressed to the U.S. Senate the following month, defended these hasty dispositions as well as the Navy Department order directing the Home Squadron to act as a "fleet of observation" in the Gulf of Mexico. A Virginian who, like most southerners, longed to see the Republic of Texas annexed to the United States, he reminded the senators of Mexico's threat to regard such a measure as an act of war, and maintained that because the annexation treaty only needed Senate approval to become effective, the United States could justifiably employ military means to repel any invasion of Texas by hostile forces that might occur before the Senate considered the issue.
Accusations that Tyler was determined to add Texas to the constellation of southern slaveholding states, even to the point of inviting a war, were probably inevitable, Tyler being a lifelong Jeffersonian Democrat who had deserted to the states'-rights wing of the Whig party just in time to be elected vice president on the William Henry Harrison ticket, and to succeed to the presidency when Harrison died, a month after his inauguration, in 1841. But whatever Tyler's reasons for wanting to add Texas to the other twenty-seven states then in the Union, it would be the next president of the United States — another southerner, James Knox Polk of Tennessee — who would transform General Taylor's newly created "corps of observation" in western Louisiana into an "army of occupation," at an isolated Texas hamlet overlooking the Gulf of Mexico called Corpus Christi.
The senior officer at Fort Jesup in early 1844 was Colonel David E. Twiggs from Georgia, who had entered the army as a captain in 1812, and had commanded the Second Dragoons since the regiment's formation in 1836. Now fifty-four years old, with a mane of white hair but a robust physique, Twiggs was a harsh, profane disciplinarian who was nevertheless admired by his officers for demanding that their regiment be superbly equipped and trained, although he was said to be "arbitrary and capricious at times." Among the men with Twiggs at Jesup were several who, like their colonel, would hold high-ranking Confederate commands in the Civil War: Major Thomas Fauntleroy, First Lieutenants William J. Hardee and Henry H. Sibley, and Second Lieutenant William Steele. On the Union side in the next war would be Brevet Second Lieutenant Rufus Ingalls, a graduate of the West Point class of 1843, and Captain Lawrence Pike Graham. But in the spring of 1844 they were all of one mind, jubilant over having been rescued from their inglorious year as mere "riflemen" and restored to the dragoon branch of the army. They had been told that they would be remounted as soon as Congress appropriated the funds.
At that time the Third and Fourth U.S. Infantry regiments each had two companies in Indian Territory just west of the Missouri border, the Third's at Fort Leavenworth, the Fourth's at Fort Scott. The other eight companies of each regiment as well as their regimental commanders had been in reserve at Jefferson Barracks, employed as a "school of instruction and practice" for recruits. Commanding the Third Infantry in the absence of the regiment's colonel, who was too frail for active service, was Lieutenant Colonel Ethan Allen Hitchcock. A feisty, eccentric, scholarly West Point graduate (1817) from Vermont, the grandson of Revolutionary War hero Ethan Allen, he had been on friendly terms with Zachary Taylor since 1819 when Lieutenant Colonel Taylor, then in charge of the Eighth Infantry, had selected the twenty-one-year-old Lieutenant Hitchcock to be his regimental adjutant. Thereafter Hitchcock had enjoyed two tours of duty at West Point, as assistant professor of tactics (1824–27) and as commandant of cadets (1829–33). While at the Academy he had met the Marquis de Lafayette, dined with Washington Irving, called on ex-president John Adams, discussed Academy matters with President John Quincy Adams, and protested the interference of President Andrew Jackson in disciplinary actions at the Point. In 1836, while serving on the western border of Louisiana with Brevet Major General Edmund P. Gaines, Captain Hitchcock was entrusted with the delivery of Sam Houston's historic note informing President Jackson that the Texans had defeated Mexican president Antonio López de Santa Anna at San Jacinto. Decades later, following his service during America's war with Mexico, the happily retired Hitchcock, after rejecting what he understood to be President Lincoln's offer to appoint him commander of the Army of the Potomac, would rejoin the Union ranks as a major general of volunteers in the War Department.
On April 20, 1844, Lieutenant Colonel Hitchcock learned that he and the Third Infantry's companies at Jefferson Barracks were to leave at once for Fort Jesup. He immediately noted in his diary a suspicion that those "unexpected" War Department orders were intended to further the plans of those who, unlike himself, wanted the Lone Star Republic to become part of the United States, a development that Hitchcock feared would eventually lead to secession by the southern states: "Rumors are rife of the annexation of Texas, and this may be a movement towards making a military occupancy of the country beyond the Sabine." With remarkable prescience he added, "I may make the first move into Texas with the colors of the United States, but I am convinced I shall not make the last." A week later he and his officers — among whom were four future Civil War generals, Second Lieutenants Don Carlos Buell, Thomas Jordan, Israel B. Richardson, and George Sykes — had sold unneeded paraphernalia, paid farewell courtesy calls, and boarded a steamboat for their journey down the Mississippi. Two smaller steamers took them up the shallow Red River to Grand Ecore, Louisiana, near Natchitoches. They disembarked on May 6 and were gradually transported by wagon teams some twenty-five miles southwestward along a narrow wooded trail to Fort Jesup.
The dragoons at Jesup were comfortably billeted with their families in white-painted, porticoed buildings facing the rectangular parade ground. Although the post was not a proper "fort," as Hitchcock remarked in his diary, it did have a theater, gymnasium, school, and well-supplied sutler's store. The Third Infantry contingent of General Taylor's army erected their tents adjacent to the post in an area Hitchcock named Camp Wilkins, for President Tyler's secretary of war.
The Third Infantry companies were scarcely out of sight of St. Louis when the Fourth Infantry's officers learned that they were to follow immediately in Hitchcock's wake. Among those accompanying the regiment's commander, Colonel Josiah H. Vose, downriver on May 7 were three who would have leading roles in the next war: Captain Robert C. Buchanan, First Lieutenant Benjamin Alvord, and Brevet Second Lieutenant James Longstreet. The Fourth Infantry companies landed at Grand Ecore on May 13 and camped nearby, but toward the end of the month Colonel Vose decided to station his troops on a high, pine-covered ridge about three miles from both Natchitoches and Grand Ecore which became known as Camp Salubrity. Colonel Vose, who was from Massachusetts, had entered the army as a captain in 1812, as had Colonel Twiggs, and like Taylor and Hitchcock had served in the Eighth Infantry in 1820. Also, having been in charge of Fort Jesup in 1834 as a lieutenant colonel in the Third Infantry, he too was quite familiar with western Louisiana. Praised in 1844 as a "highly respectable officer & eminently moral man" by a fellow regimental commander, Vose was also popular with his subalterns. Ulysses Grant wrote of him the following year, "There are but few Commanding officers as indulgent about giving young officers leaves of absence as the one I am serving under. (Col. Vose)." However, Vose, almost sixty in June of 1844, was growing increasingly feeble, and the Fourth Infantry was commanded much of the time by Longstreet's future father-in-law, Lieutenant Colonel John Garland.
The linchpin of the army being assembled on the Republic of Texas's eastern border, General Zachary Taylor was commanding the Second Military Department and living at Camp Belknap, a mile from Fort Smith, Arkansas, when he was ordered on April 23, 1844, to proceed immediately to Fort Jesup and there take charge of the First Military Department. Four days later a confidential dispatch, sent to Jesup by Adjutant General Roger Jones, informed Taylor that upon his arrival at Natchitoches he was to consider himself to be the commander not merely of a military department but also of a corps of observation, consisting in the first instance of the dragoons in garrison at Jesup together with the companies of the Third and Fourth Infantry regiments recently ordered there; that those troops were to be held in readiness for service at any moment; and that he would continue to receive instructions directly from Washington (despite the fact that his immediate superior was Brevet Major General Edmund P. Gaines, commander of the Western Division).
Taylor was a Virginian, born November 24, 1784, the third son of wealthy, socially prominent parents. When Zachary was an infant the family and their slaves moved westward, to a plantation near the village of Louisville, soon to be a leading Ohio River port in the new state of Kentucky. Zachary, with little formal education, accepted a commission dated May 3, 1808, as a first lieutenant in the Seventh U.S. Infantry, having been recommended by Kentucky congressmen. (The older brother whom he emulated, William, a second lieutenant in the U.S. Regiment of Artillerists, was killed by Indians at Fort Pickering, Tennessee, on May 30, 1808.) Whether Zachary or a member of his family sought his commission is unknown. Also unknown is exactly when Zachary initially reported for duty, but he first served as a recruiter in Kentucky. By 1810 he had been promoted to the rank of captain, and two years later he was awarded the first honorary brevet ever conferred upon an officer of the nation's armed services. The brevet, usually a promotion in title and uniform insignia only, was presented at the direction of his second cousin President James Madison, after Zachary, with the aid of a mere handful of troops and civilians, repelled a seven-hour Indian attack on Fort Harrison in Indiana Territory. Thereafter he seldom had occasion to fight, although during the Black Hawk War of 1832 he was for a short period second in command to General Henry Atkinson. That interval in Taylor's career is of historical interest chiefly because Lieutenant Jefferson Davis was Taylor's adjutant, Lieutenant Albert Sidney Johnston was Atkinson's adjutant, and in the Illinois militia under General Atkinson and Colonel Taylor for eighty days was a twenty-three-year-old storekeeper, Abraham Lincoln. In 1837 Taylor received another honorary promotion, to brevet brigadier general, a reward for his having successfully led a brigade of regulars and volunteers against several hundred Seminoles and Mikasukis at Lake Okeechobee, Florida, in the only major battle of the Second Seminole War.
As has often been suggested, General Taylor's craggy, weathered features and habitually casual dress made him look more like a farmer than a general, and in fact for decades he had owned plantations in Kentucky and along the Louisiana-Mississippi border north of Baton Rouge, all worked by slave labor. The income from his investments had enabled him to provide a comfortable life for his wife, Margaret, and their children, regardless of the lack of amenities on the isolated western posts where they had usually lived. Still, to Taylor's troops he was "Old Zach" or "Old Rough and Ready," remarkable chiefly for his unpretentious, plain-spoken, kindly demeanor.
Why Old Rough and Ready was chosen for the sensitive corps of observation command, and upon whose recommendation, is unclear. According to the secretary of war, William Wilkins, he himself was the individual responsible for the transfer of the Third and Fourth Infantry companies to Fort Jesup, though the order for the Third Infantry's movement was issued by Adjutant General Jones, and the subsequent one for the Fourth Infantry by an assistant adjutant general, in each instance with the notation "By command of Major General Scott." Evidently Winfield Scott, despite being the general-in-chief of the army, had merely a secondary role, at best, in the deliberations that led to the creation of the corps of observation. Indeed, in his memoirs Scott, in referring to the advance a year later of Taylor's corps to Corpus Christi, Texas, mentioned his "concurrence" to the selection of Old Zach as field commander in Texas. Moreover, Scott was mistaken in implying that in 1844 he had purposely assigned Captain W. W. S. Bliss, a brilliant West Pointer, to General Taylor's staff in order to supplement the latter's questionable ability to lead the corps of observation, for Bliss had been transferred to Taylor's staff in 1842, long before Old Zach was being considered for any extraordinary assignment. But whatever occurred during those 1844 deliberations, it is obvious from the adjutant general's letter to Taylor of April 27 that President Tyler intended all initiatives regarding the annexation issue to emanate from him or at his behest. It was not anticipated that General Taylor and his small force of regular army troops would have an active role in influencing future developments. All President Tyler wanted at that point was the presence near Texas's eastern border of a reliable and reassuring symbol of America's military strength, and the availability of that resource in case of need.
On June 17, 1844, General Taylor reached Fort Jesup. Waiting for him was the lengthy, confidential communication of April 27 from Adjutant General Jones which emphasized that Taylor's assignment was to command not only the Western Division's First Department but also a "corps of observation" which was to be "held in readiness for service at any moment." In addition Taylor was told, "You will take prompt measures ... to put yourself in communication with the President of Texas, in order to inform him of your present position and force, and to learn and to transmit to this office (all confidentially) whether any and what external dangers may threaten that Government or its people." In accordance with those instructions, Taylor immediately prepared a message informing Sam Houston, president of the Lone Star Republic, that there were "about a thousand effective men" at Fort Jesup, composed of seven companies of dragoons and sixteen of infantry. To deliver this dispatch Taylor chose Captain Lloyd J. Beall of the Second Dragoons, whose Civil War experience would be as commandant of the Confederate Marine Corps. Taylor mentioned the dragoon captain in his letter to Sam Houston of June 17: "Capt. Beall has instructions to await your convenience before returning to these Head Quarters and will bear any communication you may think proper to make for the information of my Government." But by the time Beall returned the next month President Tyler could no longer claim that the imminence of annexation gave the United States the right to protect Texas from invasion, for on June 8 the United States Senate had rejected the annexation treaty.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Trailing Clouds of Glory by Felice Flanery Lewis. Copyright © 2010 The University of Alabama Press. Excerpted by permission of The University of Alabama Press.
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